Why, you make everyone a contractor.

IT giant IBM told Personnel Today that the firm’s global workforce of 399,000 permanent employees could reduce to 100,000 by 2017, the date by which the firm is due to complete its HR transformation programme.

Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, the consultancy arm of the IT conglomerate, said the firm would re-hire the workers as contractors for specific projects as and when necessary, a concept dubbed ‘crowd sourcing’.

“There would be no buildings costs, no pensions and no healthcare costs, making huge savings,” he said.

Okay, first of all “crowdsourcing” as it is normally understood is the idea that an organization’s customers, stakeholders and other interested parties can often come up with a solution to a particular problem better than insiders who are often blinded by organizational groupthink and prejudices. Thus the problem is thrown out to the public where people, usually for free or for credit only work away at all or parts of the problem.

Wikipedia is crowdsourced.

What IBM is doing is firing a two-thirds of its workforce and then hiring them back on an as-needed basis, sans benefits like retirement and HEALTH INSURANCE.

At first blush (and second) this looks like a pretty cold-blooded, typical Evil-Big-Corporation thing to do, you have to admit that for a company that is in IBM’s line of work — increasingly in the business of using smart people to solve problems on a project basis, less in the “making stuff” business — then this kind of business model makes a lot of sense. Given the increasing ubiquitousness of broadband connections and applications “in the cloud” that allow for long-distance collaboration it is probably inevitable.

Which brings into even starker contrast the need to get away from the employer-based model of health care financing and to an individual-based, portable model. All of which means we are going to have to revisit the single-payer and cost containment parts of health care again sooner rather than later.

President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue issued a statement Sunday night saying the bill “ignores the will of the American people” and isn’t real health care reform.

It’s good to see that even the really reactionary top leadership of the CoC realizes that this is a done deal and continuing obstruction and hysterical gibbering is getting to be pretty self-destructive.

So, yeah. Remember last July when Senator Jim DeMint declared that Republican’s would make health care “Obama’s Waterloo?” How’s your French, Jim? There were two great generals in that battle. I guess Obama gets to be Wellington.

But seriously, this blog has been saying for more than a year that the GOP was playing a dangerous game by betting the farm on absolute opposition to all Democratic initiatives. And now where are they?

Republican David Frum hits the nail on the head:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Funny how circumstances can change, innit? American’s are now going to have eight months to decide for themselves how they like the reality of health care reform as law, as opposed to the spectre of Obamacare socialist fantasy. They’ll find that the red flag does not fly above the United States and that freedom has not evaporated.

Instead they may just decide that they have an expanded view of freedom; freedom from needless pain and suffering; freedom from the hideous choice between food and medicine; freedom from the fear and shame of debt and bankruptcy.

Millions will come to grips with the fact that this is what change looks like. It looks pretty much like the day before except perhaps just a bit brighter.

The sun will rise on a November morning eight months from now and millions of Americans will then cast their votes based on the realities of what has been done this week, not the fears. They will have had time to reflect on what political courage means and what it’s worth both as a matter for the pocketbook and the history books.

And history will write, not one single Republican voted for it. And if yesterday was Waterloo, might November look like Cannae?

But come on! This is just gloating!

Health insurance industry trade groups opposed to President Obama’s health care reform bill are paying Facebook users fake money — called “virtual currency” — to send letters to Congress protesting the bill.

Here’s how it’s happening:

Facebook users play a social game, like “FarmVille” or “Friends For Sale.” They get addicted to it. Eager to accelerate their progress inside the game, the gamers buy “virtual goods” such as a machine gun for “Mafia Wars.” But these gamers don’t buy these virtual goods with real money. They use virtual currency.

The gamers get virtual currency three ways:

Winning it playing the games
Paying for it with real money
By accepting offers from third-parties — usually companies like online movie rentals service Netflix — who agree to give the gamer virtual currency so long as that gamer agrees to try a product or service. This is done through an “offers” provider — a middleman that brings the companies like Netflix, the Facebook gamemakers, and the Facebook gamemaker’s users together.
It’s this third method that an anti-reform group called “Get Health Reform Right” is using to pay gamers virtual currency for their support.

Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, “Get Health Reform Right” requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep:

“I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have.”

Under the “Who We Are” tab on the gethealthreformright.org website: Association of Health Insurance Advisors, America’s Health Insurance Plans, American Benefits Council, BlueCross BlueShield Association, Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers, Healthcare Leadership Council, Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers, National Association of Health Underwriters, National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, and the National Retail Association.

The practice of rounding up a fake grassroots “reaction” to something is called, astroturfing. Get it? Fake grass. I suppose we could call this, Facetroturfing.

Thinking in the context of the health care debate and why the democrats seem (comparatively) so weak in their level of support:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger.

In other words, if you really support health insurance reform, you need to let your congresspeople know in positive ways. They need their spines stiffened for the upcoming battle.